HARTFORD, Conn. — The 10-word telegram sizzled through the Western Union wires from Hartford to Manhattan and must have dropped in like a hand grenade in the Yankees’ offices on 42nd Street.
“Gehrig no use to this ballclub. (Stop) Please recall him. (Stop)”
Yes, Gehrig was Henry Louis Gehrig, the powerful lefthanded batter, just turned 20, in whom the Yankees believed they had found another Babe Ruth. Ed Barrow, the Yankees’ president, had signed Gehrig off the campus of Columbia University two months earlier and brought him directly to the Bronx , were he played a handful of games. Then they sent him to Hartford for more seasoning, to play for Paddy O’Connor, a gruff former big league catcher.
“I suppose I never felt more discouraged in my whole life than I did in August 1923 when (Yankees manager) Miller Huggins called me into his office and told me he was sending me to the Hartford club of the Eastern League, Gehrig wrote in a 1927 syndicated column, compiled in Alan D Gaff’s Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir. “Believe me, it takes the heart out of a fellow.”
Gehrig had been in Hartford before, playing a dozen games under the pseudonym “Lou Lewis” in 1921, an ill-conceived scheme by the New York Giants to get a look at Gehrig against professionals while allowing him to retain his college eligibility. When the ruse was discovered, Gehrig had to sit out a year.
“He’d done his time already in the minors,” said Jonathan Eig, author of Luckiest Man, a Gehrig biography. “He’d had some bad experiences trying to hide his identity, gotten in some trouble. I think he was definitely ready to leave Hartford behind, felt he was ready to join the Yankees, but he had to pay some more dues. Gehrig was always a very sensitive guy, being away from home was hard for him, and that period when he was in that void between college and the Yankees was hard for him.”
Back at Columbia, he starred as pitcher and slugger and signed with the Yankees in June of 1923, but there was no room for him with Wally Pipp at first base.
So Gehrig reported to Hartford and went 0-for-4 in his first game on August 2. After a week or so, Gehrig was hitting under .100. It was O’Connor, exasperated, who sent that telegram to New York.
“I put him in the lineup and he was terrible,” O’Connor recalled, 14 years later in a speech to the Hartford World Series Club. “He popped up infield fly balls and he was not too hot in the field.”
Before Lou Gehrig was the Iron Horse; before he declared he was “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” despite the death sentence handed him by the disease that now bears his name; before he was one of the most admired and important athletes of the 20th Century, the American icon first had to come of age, and it happened in Hartford, 100 summers ago.
“Nineteen twenty three is in many ways the year Gehrig becomes an adult, and becomes a Yankee,” Eig said. “He had always been a sheltered young man, he’s barely been outside of New York at this point. It’s one of the most important years of transition for him.”
The steak dinner
Barrow, who ran the Yankees with an iron hand, clenched in a tight fist, read O’Connor’s wire, then called in an assistant to fire off one of his own, to Paul Kritchell, the chief scout who had brought Gehrig to the Yankees.
“Proceed to Hartford at once. (Stop) Gehrig in a bad slump. (Stop) Talk to him. (Stop).”
Kritchell boarded a train from Spartanburg, S.C. to Pennsylvania Station in New York, made his way to Grand Central and rode the New York, New Haven and Hartford rails to Hartford and proceeded from Union Station out to Bulkeley Stadium, then known as Clarkin Field, in the South End in time for the Hartford Senators game. Again, Gehrig went hitless, dropping his batting average to .062, 1-for-16.
“His chin was on his chest all afternoon,” Kritchell later told Frank Graham, author of a 1943 Gehrig biography.
After the game, Gehrig was surprised to see Kritchell, who invited him out to a steak dinner. Back downtown, they took a table at the Bond Hotel’s restaurant, down the block from the train station.
Kritchell had gotten the skinny from O’Connor, who told him Lou may have gotten in with the wrong crowd, veteran minor leaguers who were going nowhere, and gotten into drinking. Combined with his demotion to Hartford, which he didn’t fully understand, his homesickness and now his failure at the game at which he had always excelled, he was spiraling out of control.
One veteran minor leaguer, Harry Hesse, a fellow New Yorker, had moved to the outfield so Gehrig could play first base, recalling his experiences years later for another Gehrig biographer, Ray Robinson and his book, The Iron Horse.
“He took everything to heart,” Hesse recalled, “and he was a guy who needed friends, but didn’t know how to go about getting them. He’d get low, sitting there hunched over and miserable, and it was pretty tough to pull him out of it.”
But Kritchell had the right words. Gehrig trusted him, and they talked heart-to-heart at the Bond. First, Kritchell took Gehrig’s mind away from baseball as they ate their steaks, then over coffee, the scout lit up a cigar and asked what this slump was all about.
Gehrig opened up, about going hitless, losing sleep, missing New York, failing to live up to the big billing the local papers had given him when he arrived in Hartford.
Then Kritchell, firmly, reminded Gehrig that even the greatest of hitters go through slumps lasting several hitless days.
“The greatest hitters the game ever knew hit .400,” Kritchell told him, “which means they made four hits every 10 times at bat. And don’t forget the law of averages, it’s the one law nobody can beat.”
Kritchell told him that Ty Cobb, when in a slump, would try to hit the ball up the middle, advice that, in one form of another, is given to hitters to this day. Keep your weight back, stay inside the ball.
They walked to Union Station and up to the platform. When the train came, Kritchell told Gehrig, “Get a good night’s sleep and tomorrow start hitting the ball back to the pitcher. The most important thing a young ballplayer can learn is he can’t be good every day.”
Then Kritchell boarded for New York and Gehrig went to get his good night’s sleep. The next day, the Senators were in Bridgeport and Gehrig hit his first homer, in the first inning.
“He told me he wanted to be a ballplayer to earn money to help his mother and father,” O’Connor later explained, “and that won me. I decided to string along. I told owner Jim Clarkin I would keep him until he made a base hit. Then one (Saturday) down in Bridgeport he made his first hit. It was a home run drive over the centerfield fence. It gave me one of my biggest thrills in baseball.”
Hartford? That’s a good school
Lou Gehrig was born in Manhattan on June 19, 1903 and grew up in the Bronx, his parents German immigrants who knew little of baseball, and little of the world outside the neighborhood. In the popular 1942 biopic, Pride of the Yankees, Gary Cooper, portraying Gehrig, tells his parents he is going to Hartford and Henry Louis Sr. responds, “that’s a good school!” This is pure fiction, but there is truth to the legend that Gehrig’s parents wanted him to be an engineer, like an uncle, not a ballplayer.
“If you’re an immigrant and you’re still learning how things work in America, a career in sports doesn’t seem like a smart move or a practical thing for your son,” Eig said. “Gehrig never had the attitude about being an Ivy League guy. He never really felt like belonged there, he got there mostly on athletics.”
Both his parents had health problems as Gehrig became a star football and baseball player in high school, and matriculated to Columbia, and Gehrig saw the money offered in baseball as a godsend to help his parents.
After the 1921 misadventure in Hartford and his year’s suspension, Gehrig made headlines in New York on the day Yankee Stadium opened, April 18, 1923, pitching across town for Columbia, striking out 17 batters. Kritchell went to see him hit, though, and later witnessed a monster home run he hit against NYU. Kritchell made sure, unlike the Giants scouts, that things would be above board.
He took Gehrig, 19, to the 42nd street offices, introduced him to Barrow and the rest of the Yankees hierarchy, and he was signed. The next day, June 16, he was in the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium staring at Babe Ruth, Gehrig later recalled, “like a country kid getting his first look at a skyscraper.”
Gehrig stayed with the Yankees about six weeks, appeared in seven games, five as a pinch-hitter, others as a defensive replacement. Huggins wanted him to play every day and the only place for that would be Hartford. O’Connor, who had played for Huggins, was a man he trusted with talent.
After breaking out of his brief slump, Gehrig began blasting homers regularly, two on Aug 6, two more on Aug. 8, and his average steadily rose.
“There’s only one way to learn baseball,” Gehrig wrote in 1927. “And that’s to play every day. I know, for I learned a lot up there at Hartford with Pat O’Connor. I was terrible. I couldn’t hit the size of my hat, and the longer I played, the worse I got. Pat had about given up on me when I got ahold of one and broke up a ballgame. After that, he began to show more interest in me and coaching me on inside baseball I never knew existed.”
Hesse, five years older, became a roommate, friend and mentor.
According to Robinson’s Iron Horse, Hesse noticed that Gehrig was wearing the same shabby clothes every day, and learned that he was sending most of his pay home to his parents in New York. Hesse began to fix Gehrig up with dates, and gently nudge him out of his shell.
“Gehrig was always looking for big brothers in his life, having been an only child and so sheltered,” Eig said. “When he met people like Hesse, who understood him and were a little extra friendly and kind to him, he really appreciated it.”
Hesse, who later became a Yankees scout and, just before he died in 1970, urged the team to draft Kent State catcher Thurman Munson, hit .332 for the Senators, who began to pull away from the rest of the Eastern League. Gehrig hit seven homers in one seven-day stretch, and five in another seven-day stretch.
O’Connor admonished Gehrig that a baseball season, at that time, was only five months. That gave him seven months to do whatever he wanted, but during the summer, “make baseball your business.”
“You can’t play baseball in the day time and run around nights,” Paddy said.
This was what Gehrig was doing, or trying to do in Hartford. But he took the advice to heart, later called it the “best advice he ever received anywhere,” and the home runs kept coming.
“Paddy took a fatherly interest in him,” Eig said. “He gave him advice not only on how to play, but how to conduct himself. Gehrig never really talked about his father as a role model. He was motivated to be different than his father, and meeting somebody like Paddy really made an impression on Lou.”
Back to New York
On Aug. 25 in Hartford, Gehrig blasted two long home runs at Bulkeley Stadium, one in each game of a doubleheader the Senators swept. On the 31st, Gehrig, The Courant reported, sent “the mightiest wallop that ever set sail over the fence at Franklin Avenue,” completely out of the stadium as Hartford defeated Bridgeport. The stands were filled with young kids, the papers said, and they had come to adore Gehrig. This included O’Connor’s young son Jimmy, who became the Senators’ bat boy and Lou’s good luck charm.
His average soaring above .300, Gehrig hit his 23rd homer on Sept. 19, and the next day, with the championship all but clinched, O’Connor let him pitch, and let his son skip school to watch. Gehrig beat New Haven, 6-4, and had a triple.
On Sept. 22, the Yankees finally responded to O’Connor’s telegram. Now they recalled Gehrig back to New York. (Stop)
“The Senators are not tickled to let their first baseman go back, but there was no help for it,” The Courant wrote.
The Yankees were on their way to the American League championship and planned to give Gehrig a few games to rest the regulars over the last weeks of the season. They agreed to send Gehrig back to Hartford in October, for the Senators had lined up a series against the International League champs from Baltimore and expected big crowds.
Pipp sprained his ankle getting off a train, and on Sept. 27, Gehrig got his first start for the Yankees, hitting cleanup behind Ruth against the Red Sox at Fenway Park, and he hit his first major league home run. He hit three doubles and knocked in four runs the next day, and finished the four-game series at Fenway Park 9-for-19.
With the World Series coming up, manager Huggins wanted Gehrig to play against the Giants, who had beaten the Yankees in both the 1921 and 22 Series. But the opposition would have to agree to such a roster change and John McGraw, furious that the Yankees had swooped in to take the erstwhile “Lou Lewis” from under his nose two years earlier, said nothing doing. “If the Yankees have an injury, that’s their tough luck,” he said.
‘The best thing that ever happened to me’
So on Oct. 4, the end of the regular season, the Yankees played Ruth at first base and sent Gehrig, as promised, back to Hartford. He arrived at Union Station the next morning at 9:30, and played in both games as the Senators swept the series with Baltimore. Gehrig hit his 24th homer in his 59th and final game as the Senators clinched the series on Oct. 6.
With that, Gehrig’s remarkable season of growth, trial and triumph came to a close. From college, to the Yankees, back to Hartford, back to New York and, finally, back to Hartford, which could become the only baseball address outside of The Bronx he would ever know.
The next season, Gehrig agreed to returned to Hartford, so long as O’Connor was there, and was even better, hitting .369 with 37 home runs, celebrating his 21st birthday with a double, triple and homer a Bulkeley Stadium.
“He loved the manager,” Eig said, “made some friends and it became easier, socially, for him to fit in there than it would be with the Yankees because he was so shy. Once he got comfortable in Hartford, he was happy to be surrounded by people he knew and liked.”
The rest, you know about. Gehrig took over for Pipp on June 1, 1925 and played 2,130 consecutive games, hit 493 home runs, contracted the deadly disease, ALS, and on July 4, 1939, gave his courageous speech. “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He died in 1941.
In August 1923, Gehrig later recalled, he might have quit baseball if somebody came along and offered him a regular job. “But nobody did,” he said. “I went to Hartford, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
